|
I'm on a couple of home-improvement mailing lists. Yesterday, someone sent a post to one of them regarding the Anheuser-Busch Super Bowl ad where the soldiers walked through some kind of public transportation waiting room and everyone there jumped up and gave them a standing ovation.
The original poster thought this was the most wonderful thing...
This is what I sent...and before you ask, anyone who wants to use this may.
My apologies for two things: 1) bringing politics into a nonpolitical list and 2) sending an HTML e-mail.
On Monday, Feb 7, 2005, at 15:27 US/Eastern, Tee wrote:
Please go vote at this site ladies & click on third quarter (right
above the vote sign) & on the right you will see one labeled Anheuser
Bush Thank You. It was a very touching what they did. Be warned you
will need tissue! This made me cry, get the chills, & all sorts of
emotions came over me!
I know this won't be a popular sentiment, but here goes:
As a veteran of the United States Army (12 years: 2 years in the 101st Airborne, 1 year in Korea, 1 year in III Corps, 6 years Berlin Command, 2 years in the 10th Mountain Division, all in military intelligence) I am not impressed by what I will call "surface patriotism"--being all "hoo-ah, hoo-ah, I love America, support the troops, look at the six flags and nine yellow ribbons on my car" on the outside but not really caring about them in the whole. The Anheuser-Busch "let's applaud the troops" ad really left me cold.
Let me introduce you to the Weinberger Doctrine--former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger's six tenets for committing American forces to war:
1. The United States should not commit forces to combat unless the vital national interests of the United States or its allies are involved.
2. U.S. troops should only be committed wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning. Otherwise, troops should not be committed.
3. U.S. combat troops should be committed only with clearly defined political and military objectives and with the capacity to accomplish those objectives.
4. The relationship between the objectives and the size and composition of the forces committed should be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary.
5. U.S. troops should not be committed to battle without a "reasonable assurance" of the support of U.S. public opinion and Congress.
6. The commitment of U.S. troops should be considered only as a last resort.
Now let's see how George Bush's Guernica compares to the Weinberger Doctrine:
1. The United States should not commit forces to combat unless the vital national interests of the United States or its allies are involved.
Were the "vital national interests" of the United States or its allies involved here? No.
To understand this point you need to understand Saddam Hussein. Saddam cared about exactly one thing: making sure he woke up in the morning. He was the titular leader of Iraq, a country that contains three sects of Muslims (Sunni, Shia and Kurd) that hate each other. He ran his country as a secular dictatorship because if he was running it as an Islamic theocracy (the form of government used in all of the countries in the Persian Gulf except for Iraq and Bahrain), the country would be constantly in a state of civil war.
You've all seen the Iraqi flag, right? Three horizontal bands? If you were to take an outline map of Iraq and lay it over an Iraqi flag, each band would represent one of the three sectoral boundaries. Saddam's troops had little to no influence over the Shia zone. They had even less over Iraqi Kurdistan, except right after Saddam lost a war and decided to take out his anger on the Kurds. And because of the size and population patterns of Iraq, there wasn't much for Saddam to control in the Sunni sector. The Middle East/North Africa analysts I know liked to jokingly refer to the president-for-life of Iraq as "Baghdad Mayor Saddam Hussein" because that's essentially what he was.
Saddam hadn't been in the business of supporting terrorists for quite some time. He was afraid to; every Islamic terror group had Saddam very high on their enemies list. This because Saddam was a "Ramadan Muslim." You know how we have Christmas Christians and Passover Jews, right? People who were raised in the faith, pretty much drifted away from it, but go to church on the religion's high holy days because Mom would really be happy if everyone could go to midnight Mass. Muslims have those people too, and one of them was Saddam, who loved his whiskey and cigars, who had women and Christians in his government's inner circle (Tariq Aziz, who was Saddam's right-hand man, was a devout Christian), who had no Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue...Saddam was a bad Muslim and most of the terror groups wanted his ass for apostasy. Saddam knew it--he had several men on his staff who had been surgically altered to look just like him, and whose job was to run around the country pretending to be him, and Saddam never slept in the same bed twice. Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, has a desk that does nothing but track the movements of Middle Eastern leaders, and they always maintained that tracking Saddam was next to impossible.
Back to the subject at hand...our allies in the Persian Gulf did not feel threatened by Saddam; none of them have supported our efforts. He didn't have enough of a navy to threaten merchant shipping in the Persian Gulf. He couldn't have closed the Strait of Hormuz because he didn't have the kind of missiles or mines you need to sink a merchantman--and since all of the countries around Iraq are hostile to it, the weapons would have had to been taken to the chokepoint by ship...across a body of water that is completely covered by US Navy surface search radar.
What about oil? That's pretty important, but Iraq is not the only nation in the world that has it.
2. U.S. troops should only be committed wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning. Otherwise, troops should not be committed.
General Eric Shinseki was the Chief of Staff of the Army during the run-up to the Iraq war. DU-only comment: Yes, this is the general responsible for the black berets. They presented him with the number of troops he would deploy. Shinseki told Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld that it wasn't nearly enough. Bush forced Shinseki to retire over this comment. As it turns out, Shinseki was absolutely right; they didn't send nearly enough troops.
That we attempted to fight this war on a budget indicates that the troops weren't committed "wholeheartedly." And the way this war was set up, there's no benchmark for "winning."
3. U.S. combat troops should be committed only with clearly defined political and military objectives and with the capacity to accomplish those objectives.
We already discussed the "capacity to accomplish those objectives" part of this tenet--it wasn't there. Now let's talk about the "clearly defined political and military objectives."
The purpose of this war was to Secure Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction, and here I better explain weapons of mass destruction because this is a decorating list, not a military list. Just before the war kicked off, Secretary of State Powell went on television with a little bottle. He told the world that the bottle in his hand could hold enough nerve agent to kill a million people, or something like that.
To use an old army expression, that's bullshit.
You certainly can kill a million people with a little bitty bottle of nerve agent, but you'll need to line those million people up, instill one drop of agent directly into each person's eye, and quell the riots that will result after everyone else sees the first person die a really horrible death. I have a very nice bridge in Brooklyn to sell to anyone who believes you can pull this off.
A chemical deployment can be performed for two reasons: killing troops and denying the enemy terrain. In both cases, you'll need hundreds of gallons of agent. Agent is almost never considered for killing troops for two reasons. The first is that everyone who fights against an army who's known to have chemical weapons has all the equipment needed to protect themselves--chemical agent alarms, personal protective equipment, decontamination equipment and people trained in its use. The second is weather-related--the wind has to be right to use chemicals, and if it shifts while the agent is in the air your troops will get hit with the weapons you tried to use against the enemy. (The attack on Halabja worked in part because the people of Halabja didn't have chemical protective gear--most civilians, with the exception of exterminators, chemists and car painters, don't have this equipment.) Field artillery is far more effective for killing.
Terrain denial is a better use. All you do is spray the ground in a choice maneuver area with a "persistent" agent--one that's thick so it won't evaporate readily--and mark the area as contaminated. It will take any attacking force a while to prepare to cross the area, and you can shell them while they're donning their masks and suits. This works once--when the enemy knows you're doing this, they'll know to wear their suits so that when they come to an obstacle, it takes them nine seconds to don their masks and 20 to don their gloves. (This works to your advantage in a hot climate because those suits are airtight, but then they figure out they need to send a helicopter out to find all the obstacles you put out, then plot routes that don't require passing through them, and you've blown it.)
In any case, if you don't have a chemical plant you don't have a chemical warfare program--you can't make this stuff in someone's basement. Saddam hasn't had a chemical plant since 1991.
In the past couple of weeks, the Powers that Be have announced that there were no WMD in Iraq. Which means there were no "objectives" because the whole war was built on a framework of lies.
4. The relationship between the objectives and the size and composition of the forces committed should be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary.
This is good advice if you have objectives, but right now the objective is "don't get yourself killed."
5. U.S. troops should not be committed to battle without a "reasonable assurance" of the support of U.S. public opinion and Congress.
This they had. What they didn't have was the support of the administration.
Let's take the Humvee armor situation. Humvee armor is a trivial exercise. It requires six belly plates--four for the crew compartment, one for the cargo area and the gas tank, and one for the engine--and four beltline plates--they go over the doors--along with four Lexan side windows, to protect the crew of a Humvee from improvised explosive devices. A metalworking machine called a CNC plasma cutter can make a set of these plates from one-inch plate steel in about two hours. You cut the ten plates out, band them to a pallet, tape a sack of bolts to the top of the pallet, write "To Any Soldier" on it, stick a stamp on it and drop it on the nearest mailbox. And after the post office quits being mad about the flattened mailbox, you've got a protected crew. There is an army depot at Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, that could make these easily; all it requires is the money to buy a couple dozen CNC plasma cutters, the cash for the plate steel, salary for five or six machinists, and the will to do so. The money's there; you can buy four of these machines for less than the death benefit for one soldier--plus you still have the original soldier. (Okay, you also need a tablesaw to make the windows.)
This administration launched a war without enough of a logistical tail in theater (example: for the first couple of months, each soldier received 1.5 litres of water per day; a soldier in combat in the desert needs at least four litres of water per day to maintain his precious bodily fluids), without planning for the aftermath, and without considering the effects of their actions. They secured the Oil Ministry but not the explosives stockpiles; they secured the oilfields but not the Koran Museum. And they kicked out everyone in the old Iraqi Army...with effect that the "insurgents" have first-rate weapons just like they had when they were still in the army, because the New Iraqi Insurgency is the old Iraqi army. (Real rebels don't have a chain of command set up. These guys do.)
This was also the first war I can think of in which taxes weren't raised to pay for it. Tax increases for wars are proforma acts...and in this case, it didn't happen.
6. The commitment of U.S. troops should be considered only as a last resort.
Troops were committed as a first resort, and would have been committed sooner if Bush would have had his way.
And for these reasons, and thousands more, I don't get teary-eyed watching these commercials.
Some freepers have come out of the woodwork, but I've received a few messages of support.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
